Making trees

Right now, there isn't any gameplay... just free movement with barely any collision detection. That said, everything visible except grass is a collider.

My plan for gameplay is going to be a mix of vehicle driving ( outside ) and 1st person. I've already got a fairly robust framework for vehicle support from my aborted previous game and it's just a matter of porting it over to my new engine. Regarding first person, I'm planning on making it *super* realistic, with your character being able to slip and fall if on a steep ledge and so on.

My game -- and this is mainly the result of talking with my friends over beers -- is still in the concept stage, but here it is in a nutshell.

It's called "At the Mountains of Mars" and is based off the Lovecraft novella "At the Mountains of Madness" which is about an ill-fated expedition in the 30's to antarctica, and what they discovered there.

There will be *no* weapons. The game is about survival and escape, pure and simple. You're a driver, delivering parts to the Starkweather-Moore ice-mining expedition on a mostly terraformed Mars ( you can get around, but you need to breathe easily ). On arrival you discover the outpost to be destroyed, and everybody dead, with wreakage and destruction leading to an ominous pit in the ice cap. You drive in to try to find survivors and an avalanche traps you inside...

There won't really be hit points, only the idea of maintaining your sanity and heart-rate, since you'll only have a limited amount. The shit that goes on in the caverns is going to be *scary*, in principle, and you basically just want to get out and notify your colony to get the hell off the planet.

If you've read any Lovecraft you'll understand the general idea. In terms of feel, I want it to be something like Silent Hill 2 but 1st person.

TomorrowPlusX Wrote:Actually, I intend the engine to be open source, something liberal like the MIT license.

If people are interested I'll start posting builds.

I'm really interested not really to use it ( though I might), but rather just to see how you handle your heightmap and how you do all the grass, trees, particles, and everything else cool you have in that engine.

Updates... I added support for multipass rendering of the tree foliage ( per the suggestion from NicholasFrancis in my "Continuous Vegetation" thread ) and now my trees look pretty sweet.

Regarding releasing the source, I'll put a build up soon. I've got some minor edge-case details which I've still got to iron out. Not to mention it's nowhere near a complete engine yet, considering there's a lot missing and there's a lot on paper which I still have to implement.

But that said, it does some -- I think at least -- clever stuff, and might be a useful tool for people or at the very least might help people see a new approach here and there. The source ( and headers ) are heavily documented and I've got full doxygen docs for nearly every class. I believe in stiff, uncompromising documentation.

monteboyd Wrote:Hey TomorrowPlusX, just wanted to say that I think what you're doing is amazing.

Not only does the engine look totally awesome but I think that game concept manages to be really original while using a classic sci-fi theme.

So keep plugging away at it!

Thanks, man. I appreciate it. I happen to love sci-fi, Lovecraft, and adventure games, so it all sort of makes sense.

Regarding releasing source -- my goal is to have a working 1st person mode before I release anything to people. Mainly because I need to build stuff using the engine to work out design and implementation bugs. Building a robust 1st person system will tax the physics integration as well as the overal design philosophy of the system, so I think it's worthwhile before I make the code public.

Also, I'm sorry to say, the cool particle effects from my "Explosions" thread from long ago ( http://idevgames.com/forum/showthread.php?t=9354 ) haven't been brought over to the new engine yet. I had problems with the emitter design when dealing with rapidly moving objects, and I intend to investigate how best to implement it before I bring it across.

TomorrowPlusX Wrote:Thanks, man. I appreciate it. I happen to love sci-fi, Lovecraft, and adventure games, so it all sort of makes sense.

Hope this isn't too OT - yeah I've read a little of Lovecraft, my favourite of his short stories are The Outsider and Rats in the Walls. I think there's probably a lot of scope for original gameplay and more story-driven games within the horror genre.

Clive Barker would be my favourite horror author, unfortunately the game he was involved with, Undying, didn't take enough risks with the ideas he had, it was too much of a first person shooter. I think the clever gameplay ideas in it had more potential. For example - you could perform "Scrying" whereby for a short time you would see events of the past in the area you were exploring overlaid on your vision. This was basically used to progress the linear storyline most of the time but I could see a similar technique being used in a game where the goal is to solve a mystery, rather than just shoot things.

Anyway, thought you might want to check it out (if you haven't already) for some inspiration.

TomorrowPlusX Wrote:Actually, I intend the engine to be open source, something liberal like the MIT license.

If people are interested I'll start posting builds.

That would be most wonderful! I would love to play around with such a thing. maybe implement such a thing into unity too (though I'm sure someone *cough aaarku* will beat me to it).
I don't know, I just see something like this being very useful. Keep up the AMAZING work.